Corel's CorelDRAW Graphics Suite 9 is the first major
commercial graphics package for Linux, combining both the
object-oriented drawing capabilities of CorelDRAW and the bitmap
photo editing capabilities of Corel PhotoPaint. If Graphics Suite 9
can provide end users and artists with good paint and draw
capabilities, this will be a major step forward for Linux as a
desktop operating system. Let's see how it measures up.

Installation

GS9 requires kernel 2.2 or higher and glibc 2.0 or better
running on a 200MHz processor with 64MB of RAM and 255MB of free
disk space. My test box substantially exceeded all of the
requirements, but this actually ended up causing problems.
Installation via the installation script went without incident, but
due to incompatibilities with both XFree 4 and Red Hat 7.0 the
FontTastic font system was not correctly installed. A short call to
Corel's technical support, manual installation of the FontTastic
software took care of the problem (I recommend calling Corel
technical support for instructions specific to your system). Once
the initial font problems were resolved, both Draw and Paint loaded
without problems.

The Interface

For a user migrating from Windows, both CorelDRAW and
PhotoPaint should have comfortingly familiar interfaces. This is in
part because Corel chose to use the WINE Windows compatibility
layer
(http://www.winehq.com/)
to enable their applications to run on Linux with minimal changes.
This approach has several implications from a technical standpoint,
but from a user's perspective it simply means that you can expect
Graphics Suite 9 for Linux to have the same features in the same
places as Graphics Suite 9 for Windows.

While the user interface may be the same as it is on Windows,
that by no means guarantees that the interface will be good. In
fact, both CorelDRAW and PhotoPaint tended to have clunky
interfaces and features that don't work quite the way one would
expect. They also don't offer much in the way of key-stroke
compatibility with their Adobe counterparts—that is the keyboard
shortcuts in the two sets of applications are different and the
Corel products are missing shortcuts to some often-used features.
While their product may be targeted at a different market, Corel
has attempted to duplicate all of the features and most of the
interface of two applications (Adobe's Photoshop and Illustrator)
that are targeted more at the graphics professional than the home
user.

Features

There are both good and bad points to the effort to provide a
duplicate feature set. On the good side is the relative ease of
learning CorelDRAW and PhotoPaint once you know their Adobe
counterparts. Most of the menu options are familiar and function
much the same as they do in the Adobe apps, and PhotoPaint includes
a complete set of functionally identical filters. CorelDRAW and
PhotoPaint will even open .psd and .ai documents produced by their
Adobe counterparts. On the downside is the fact that trying to
replicate the working environment of someone else's software is
rather difficult and, in this case, not very thoroughly
done.

The biggest problem areas that I encountered were in
PhotoPaint's relatively awkward handling of layers and layer
transparency (the bread and butter of any image editor) and
CorelDRAW's lack of keyboard shortcuts for many common
functions.

Despite these deficiencies, Corel does do a fairly good job
of adding features that a home user will appreciate, such as a
helpful splash screen offering options to do common tasks such as
creating a new document, opening the last one you worked on,
viewing a tutorial or scanning an image. They also developed some
of the best file load/save dialogs that I've seen in any Linux
application; by default they open with your home directory as the
root directory, but they still offer the option to look at other
drives and everything under the root directory via a drop-down
menu. These and other features help make Graphics Suite 9 (and in
particular the CorelDRAW portion) a worthwhile option for many
people.

Technical Details and Other Notes

One of the most interesting things about Corel's Linux
products is that they use WINE (the GPL'd Windows compatibility
layer) to run what are otherwise essentially the same applications
as Corel's Windows-based products. This isn't really a good or bad
thing; there are several distinct advantages to this approach, but
there are also major problems. I noted earlier that using WINE
ensures that the Windows and Linux versions will function
essentially identically, but WINE isn't perfect. I ran into
problems with the main windows expanding beyond the bounds of the
screen in both Corel applications. While easily fixable, a new
Linux user would most likely not know the solution (holding down
the Alt key and dragging the window to a position where a window
border is visible, then resizing). Both packages also had problems
rendering fonts on-screen, and I suspect that this too is at least
partially a result of running through WINE. Though this is
ultimately not a big deal in CorelDRAW—the visual artifacts do not
appear in printed documents—it does present a problem in
PhotoPaint where fonts get rasterized at screen resolution. These
and other similar glitches make Graphics Suite 9 appear a little
rough around the edges, but the glitches are for the most part
offset by the features that Corel offers.

Trending Topics

Upcoming Webinar

Getting Started with DevOps - Including New Data on IT Performance from Puppet Labs 2015 State of DevOps Report

August 27, 2015
12:00 PM CDT

DevOps represents a profound change from the way most IT departments have traditionally worked: from siloed teams and high-anxiety releases to everyone collaborating on uneventful and more frequent releases of higher-quality code. It doesn't matter how large or small an organization is, or even whether it's historically slow moving or risk averse — there are ways to adopt DevOps sanely, and get measurable results in just weeks.